High-speed industrial doors, which are capable of being rolled up on a shaft or drum to open, have long been used in the storing and staging areas of commercial buildings such as factories and warehouses. Materials handling machinery, such as conveyors and lift trucks are commonly used to transport items to, from, and between storage areas and staging areas such as loading docks. In such applications, as well as others known in the art, the industrial doors are often required to open quickly, such as opening at a rate of approximately 48 inches per second up to 100 inches per second or greater. This speed enhances productivity, cost savings, and safety, especially where cold storage and distribution is involved. Additionally, specific environmental or security requirements may need door speed and sealing integrity to be maintained in either the storing or staging area or both, e.g., temperature, cleanliness, etc.
Conventional high-speed roll-up door assemblies include a pair of vertically oriented assemblies installed proximate the vertical sides of an opening defining the passageway for people and commercial vehicles and are sometimes called “side columns”, or “guide assemblies”. The side columns are have structures which guide the flexible door panel during opening and closing. These “guides” provide surfaces which engage a vertical marginal edge portion of the moving door panel therein. The guide assemblies are installed on only one side of the opening and do not extend into the width of the opening so as to maximize the clear path of travel for freight-moving vehicles traversing the passage, and to avoid damage to the assemblies from collisions. The flexible door panel, often including its accompanying parts, e.g., a relatively rigid bottom bar, guide retention means such as rollers, knobs, etc., is thus made wider than the width of the opening such that a vertical margin of the door panel on each side of the opening near the vertical side edges thereof, extends into and is thus guided or retained within the guides.
Even though the door panel is moved vertically at a relatively fast rate, there are times when the door panel—or a portion of the door assembly itself—is impacted by a vehicle and dislodged from at least one of the guides. The door assembly cannot operate properly until the displaced door panel is reconfigured to be within the door assembly's guides so as to be in its normal operating configuration.
Reconfiguring or “repairing” the door's guiding function after an impact has been the subject of the design of others including the applicants of this application. However, the prior art has only limited or no solutions for restoring or “repairing” of an automatic high speed roll up door when it is dislodged in a direction which places the panel inside of, or through, the opening of the passage. In this case, with a conventional roll-up door, the wider door panel will be pushed through the narrower opening distorting its normal shape so as to comply with the width of the opening of the passage. As a result, the door panel and its associated structures as well as the side columns and the wall portions constituting the opening, are more susceptible to damage both because of the dislodging and the gesticulations required to repair the door to its operational state. These difficulties can result in commercial losses due to lost productivity, thermal losses, and loss of environmental integrity on one or both sides of the door. Repairing the door may also tend to damage the door panel or guide assemblies. The repair from such a dislodgement is routinely accomplished through human operator effort, and is not automated. The door panel must be moved back to the other side of the opening before being realigned and reinserted within the guides. Returning the door panel to the door-assembly side of the opening can be difficult—perhaps even requiring disassembly of portions of the door assembly—and may incur additional time, and further expose the door panel to more damage.
It is known in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,141,043 and 5,319,015 to provide a “self-repairable” industrial door assembly having side uprights each including a slideway having a guide wall on either side of the plane of a door panel or curtain. Lateral portions of the curtain slide within the slideways and are adapted to escape from the slideways in the event of an abnormal or atypical transverse force. However, these doors work well only if the dislodgement of the door panel in the direction of the side of the opening where the guide assemblies are installed. If the door is displaced in the opposite direction, the stiff (relative to repairing) door panel material is forced to deform from its unbuckled state to fir within the opening. Automated or easy repair on such an instance can again be costly and/or can put undue wear on the door panel and guide assemblies.
Applicant is aware of low speed doors used in U.S. car washes which have loose or relatively wide stationary guides installed on the inside a door opening and have relatively non-stiff, light weight material comprising the door panel. These doors can repair themselves with some degree of success when dislodged in either direction. However, the low speed and reduced weight and stiffness of these doors are unacceptable for applications like freezer and warehouse applications because of the commercial demands for security, wind load, insulating ability, and high speed. Also, the flexibility of these light weight panels reduces potential damage while problems in waiting for repair are less critical in the car wash application. There is also far less criticality to maximizing the door opening width. In the meantime automobile traffic guided through a car wash, especially by its owner, does not experience the high speed and high rate of freight-vehicle traffic that high speed industrial door assemblies are required to manage or the higher rate of collisions between door and vehicle.
The present invention is provided to address these and other considerations.